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Artificial Intelligence

A big part of your task in creating an animatronic, is giving something the illusion of life. This includes making it behave in a way that is believable. Making it appear to have some level of intelligence. With the base NXT software, programming true artificial intelligence into the NXT robots is probably about as close to impossible as it can get. So, your goal is to make it appear intelligent, even if it is not.

Artificial Intelligence is becoming more and more common in our world though, and has been a hot topic for years. People are actually able to even get the NXTs to show levels of artificial intelligence, where they actually can learn. They are doing this through programming languages, as opposed to NXT’s standard GUI system. Here’s an example from a college student using an algorithm know as Q-Learning through the programming language Python. If you youtube Q-learning, or Lego Q-Learning, you can find out more about the algorithm, as well as find other videos of Lego robots utilizing the Q-Learning algorithm.

In 2011, one of the first big MOOCs to gain a lot of national press was the Artificial Intelligence Mooc, provided by Stanford in collaboration with Peter Norvig of Google. The class is no longer running, but you can still see all the lecture videos on YouTube.